This might be my last book report that I write about for a while! Next month is when Baby L is due, so I probably won’t be able to write a report. But the books that I read will still be tracked on my Goodreads, if you’re interested!
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I don’t know what I’m thinking looking up new games that I want to try when this baby is due in less than a month. But I’ll try my best to squeeze the most out of my free time before it’s gone! I’ll have a nice two-week break before the baby’s due date that I want to spend laying on the couch playing cozy Switch games. So based on my research, here’s a list of games that I want in order of “I have to have it NOW” to “it can wait!”
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A year ago after we moved in one of the first projects I tackled was the powder bathroom. It should’ve been an easy win! Just change the vanity top, paint the cabinets, put up some wallpaper, change the light fixture, and, and, and…
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This pregnancy has forced me to take things slow. I get tired easily and just want to lay down all the time. As a result, I have been doing much less on the weekends and reading at home instead! So I devoured a good number of books this month.
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I’ve shown a little preview of this room on Instagram, but after a few more furnishings, it now feels complete!
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We’ve done a lot since moving into our home last May. A lot of renovations gave the house a nice facelift, but we also had to do a few that were absolutely necessary (looking at you, termite-control and broken water heater). Here’s a list of everything we’ve done so far that has made a tremendous difference:
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This was our last big home project to cross off the list before Baby L is born! I really wanted to make over this bathroom that’s next to the nursery to be both beautiful and kid-friendly for the years to come. It was so bland and boring (you’ll see below)! I’m so proud of all the hard work HB put into this bathroom makeover, especially since I couldn’t help out as much as I would’ve liked to.
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This month I traveled to New York - which gave me plenty of time to read while waiting in airports and on the plane! Traveling is always when I have the most time dedicated to just reading (or watching!) media.
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This month we went on vacation to Cancun, which gave me some time to catch up on my summer reading (in between playing Animal Crossing)!
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Not too much reading happened this month…because I rediscovered my love for Animal Crossing and played that during most of my free time! But I at least finished my book club book “Mexican Gothic” in time for June’s meeting. So that’s something!
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This year is the year for sprucing up our backyard! Last year we left it as it was (aside from weeding and installing gutters). See how it looked before when we bought it:
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It had been nearly 2 years since I last touched Animal Crossing. It was a nice little escape during the pandemic. But after places started to open up, and I became interested in other hobbies (ahem, plants…), I flat out abandoned the game. Recently my friend picked it back up, and I read a blog post about how to play Animal Crossing for the long run. These two things combined encouraged me to see what other people have been doing with their islands.
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I dip my toe into drawing or painting maybe once a year. During Christmas, I paint people cards, and that seems to be the only time I paint during the year now! I would like to get in the habit of making art more frequently. But I also don’t want to be intimidated by beautiful yet ambitious art projects. Therefore, I’ve been searching for some easy art doodles or paintings I can do in less than 30 minutes - 1 hr. Here are some of my favorite Youtube Channels for making easy art:
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Though you might’ve seen this room many times on Instagram, I actually haven’t shared it here on the blog! I’ve been making over the living room in phases and the final touches were installed in Feb/Mar. So it’s now time to reveal the room!
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I’m waaay behind on my monthly book reports, but I’m trying to catch up! Here’s what I read in May:
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You can bet that I’ve immediately got started on the nursery ever since I learned I was pregnant. In fact, I have a Pinterest board full of nursery ideas that I compiled before I even had any intention of having kids. All this dreaming has paid off!
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Some days I still cannot believe it! I’m 13 weeks pregnant and all I have to show for it is a bloated stomach. 
I am delighted to share the big news a year after we moved into our new house! It feels like big things are happening (very quickly!) around here.
A shorter month, but that does not mean less books! With the trips to Denver and Vegas I took this month, I had plenty of time to kill in airports and hotels, which I did by reading. Once again, I am so grateful for my new Kindle! It’s small, compact, and long-lasting battery. It’s been great for travel.
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Recently I discovered the r/MakeupAddition and r/SkincareAddition subreddits and well, it’s not been good for my wallet! I saw what people on SkincareAddition were getting at TJ Maxx, and lo and behold, there was some good stuff. It had been a while since I had been to TJ Maxx. Now that I know what to look out for, I was ready to make a trip out there again!
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New Year, new reading challenge! While I started off strong, my book-reading tapered off towards the end of the month. I got kiiind of absorbed in phone games, rediscovering my love for Candy Crush and finding a new obsession with Wordle. My goal next month is to read when I get the urge to game or watch Youtube!
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This month I tried to continue to read books instead of go on social media. I wasn’t as successful as last month (re-downloaded some social media apps, eek), but I still read a good number of them. I also started a bunch of books but didn’t end up finishing them, so you’ll probably see them next month! Here’s what I’ve finished so far:
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This month I read a lot of books! What motivated me was to scroll less on social media, and to read more books during that time instead. I also started listening to more audiobooks while going on walks and doing chores. Finally, I joined our neighborhood book club which motivated me to read even more! As a result, I consumed a LOT of books, which I’ll share with the following rating system:
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I waited to share pics of my home office until after our new floors and windows were installed. It was dark and dingy in there before, but now everything is bright and light, the perfect energizing work environment!
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Have any of you ever seen or heard of The Home Edit? They’re a badass team of (female-led!) organizing experts that completely transform people’s homes. My friend Justine gave me their book a while ago and while I loved reading it, my obsession with The Home Edit (THE) didn’t fully kick in until I watched their Netflix show: Get Organized with The Home Edit.
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Shortly after moving into our new home, I bought a diffuser. I wanted to try using a diffuser because I hoped that the scents would permeate and last longer than burning a candle. A diffuser’s smaller footprint also appealed to me - rather than buying candles that take up space, all I’d need is another small bottle of essential oil.
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It’s show time! The media room was THE first room that I wanted to work on after we moved in. I so desperately wanted to feel “at home” in this new house, and for me, what brings me comfort is watching TV. As a result, the media room was first priority. No joke, a week after moving in, we started painting the walls of this room BLACK! Cue “Paint it Black”… 
I am currently remodeling our powder room with HB, and one thing that I really wanted in this bathroom is a cool, fun, bold wallpaper. After ordering samples of the wallpaper that I had shared in my mood board, I chose the black and gold print for one reason: it was easier to apply on the textured walls. You can barely see any bumps under the black wallpaper, whereas the white paper showed the bumps in high relief. As a result, I ordered 3 rolls and started the project with much hope.
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Before attending Ryan and Masha’s wedding in California, HB and I arrived a couple days earlier to visit Yosemite. It was our first time in this national park! We had an incredible time there as we got to spend exploring it with Ethan and Sarah. We made the most of our three short days there with the following hikes and activities:
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I was really excited to order and try out the top-rated gel manicure kit from Amazon. After seeing my friend’s manicure where she used the kit, I felt confident enough to do my own gel mani’s at home! Best of all, this kit was super affordable at <$40 and it came with the UV light, a bunch of tools, 6 colors, base + top coats, and cuticle oil.
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I have been spending a lot of time working on our home. Up until now, it’s mostly fixing things up and adding decor. But the powder room will be the first room to undergo renovation! I’ve been thinking about it a lot but am paralyzed with indecision. To help me with my vision, I put together a good old mood board!
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Wednesday was my 28th birthday! I want to start documenting what my birthdays look like, since my memory is really bad, and I want to look back on these mems of how I spent my time with loved ones. If possible, I try to take my bday off every year to give myself a day of self care. So here’s what I did in 2021:
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We have finally moved into our new home and this month was all about buying furniture and home goods! Here’s what I picked up that Sparked Joy for me this month:
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I’ve had a lot of time to listen to podcasts while moving into our new home and painting the walls of our media room! I got a good chunk of listening in this weekend as I spent hours painting the room. Here are a couple of episodes that I recently listened to and enjoyed:
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Sparks Joy is a monthly roundup of people, experiences, or things that brought joy or value for me during this time. It’s always good to practice a little gratitude! Here is what sparked joy for me in the month of May.
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What makes the movie theater experience so special? It is the dark, sound-proof room with a big screen and surround sound. So that we can be truly immersed in the movie! When I think about creating a media room in my own home, I want to replicate these same factors to turn a room into a theater. I really love the execution Albie Buabeng did here in her home:
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Last summer during the height of the pandemic, I decided to upgrade my entire office setup since it looked like I’d be working from home for a while. One of those things was my computer, which used to be a 2013 Macbook Pro. It was definitely due for an upgrade! I looked into getting an iMac, which I actually did - then promptly returned it after finding out it wouldn’t be able to double as a second monitor (seriously, who at Apple made that stupid decision?!). My setup needed to switch seamlessly between work and personal use. As a result, after much research (and YouTube videos), I decided to build my own PC for the same price I’d pay for an iMac, only better.
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This guide lists all the items I love and use to take care of my houseplants. I will not recommend anything that I do not personally use. I hope this helps you, no matter if you are a beginner or a seasoned plant parent!
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At the beginning of the pandemic in March last year, I knew that I’d have to break my boredom at home with some sort of activity. I had made a miniature dollhouse from a kit that I brought home from Japan before. It certainly took up a lot of time but was also fun to make. As a result, I thought I’d try this activity again while holed up at home. Little did I know that the project would end up taking me over a year to finish! 
Welcome to the jungle (bed) room! Our bedroom has evolved quite a bit since the beginning when we moved in. However, I always envisioned it to be calming/relaxing and it has definitely served us well.
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Many homes in our area have a “formal” living room that’s usually off to the side of the entrance. To me, this room is SUCH a waste a space, because why would we need both a formal and informal living room? As I thought a little more about how I want to purpose the space for our family’s needs, it occurred to me that it would be put to good use as a hobby or music room!
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I am very excited to have my own office in our new home! Right now, HB and I share an office (see our Home Office Tour here). It made designing the space kind of difficult since we both have different styles and in the end it became a mish-mash of our things. In my next office, I want to be more intentional about sticking to a color palette. The best part is, since it’s just me and my stuff I can decorate it however I want! I’m letting HB lead the direction of his own office - I’m interested in seeing how that’ll turn out. 
We’ve been spending a lot of time in this room in the last year - our home office. Both of us have been working from home since March 2020. While we will probably return to our actual offices at some point, but working in here for such a long time made me reconsider my entire set up. As a result, I upgraded a TON of things so now my home office setup is probably better than the one at the actual office! So come geek out with me - I’m excited to share my tech!
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Our new home has a three-car garage. But since there’s only two of us and two cars, that extra garage seemed pretty useless at first. Until I thought about it some more and it hit me! The space would be perfect as a home gym! HB and I have been going to our community’s shared gym during the pandemic. It would be such a luxury to be able to work out at home, which would save so much time, and I’d have NO excuse not to work out!
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One of the rooms that I am most excited to decorate in the new house is the play room! This is a room that will explode with fun, bright, happy colors. I am most looking forward to playing with our kids, so naturally, I am also excited to design a space where kids can play and let their imaginations run wild. I think I’m just a big kid at heart!
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One of my favorite rooms in our home is the game/media room. It’s fun, colorful, and comfortable. We certainly spend a lot of time in here, and especially during this last year…it provided us a good amount of entertainment while we were stuck at home. Come on in; I’m excited to share our different interests/hobbies that can be seen throughout this room!
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Believe it or not, it has been one year since we welcomed Dobby into our home! We wanted to foster some dogs during the pandemic but never could’ve imagined that we’d end up keeping one. We started fostering in 2019 to get a better idea of what dog ownership was like since neither HB nor I had grown up with dogs. We both wanted a dog eventually, but wanted to first experience what it was like. Through fostering, we learned that each dog is SO different. We had fostered 3 other dogs before Dobby. Lucky for us, Dobby ended up being our “goldilocks” dog - I knew I wanted to keep her after only 2 weeks!
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Sparks Joy is a monthly roundup of people, experiences, or things that brought joy or value for me during this time. It’s like practicing gratitude, but I can geek about them here online with other people!
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My imagination is going wild thinking of all the possible ways I could design our new home! Let’s start with one of the main, and most seen, spaces of the home - the living room. The way I imagine our living room to look is vastly different from what our first home’s living room looked like. For our first home, I was all about color play. I wanted bold, happy colors such as pink, yellow, and cobalt to greet me when I walked through the door. In fact, you can see what our first living room looked like in this post.
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Now that our move is a reality (yes, we’re really doing it this time!), I am panicking. I need to document the look of our current home, which I love, before we move! As a result, I speed-cleaned all the rooms and took pictures of them on the only sunny day last week. First up for showing is our living room, which I’ve actually shared here in the past. It is part of one large, open floor plan that shares a space with the dining area and kitchen downstairs. But as we change, our home also evolves with us. After a pandemic year, our living room looks vastly different now than it did before. Can you tell the differences?
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I still can’t believe I’m saying this, but yes, we are moving! HB and I have been house-hunting since last November. It has been quite the journey. It was stressful, anxiety-inducing, exciting, frustrating, sad, and insert any other emotion here. In fact, we were under contract for another home back in February, but it didn’t work out. So the entire heart-breaking process began yet again. Ironically, this home that we’re now under contract for has the exact same layout as the other one that we backed out of. What can I say, we like what we like, and God is so good to provide us a second chance!
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I recently discovered this genre called “cozy games” that are aesthetic and relaxing video games. These are just the kind of games I look for and enjoy playing! Anything that gets my heart rate up and hands sweaty (even Mario Party) make me feel incredibly amped up and anxious. That is the opposite of what I want to feel when playing games, lol. Low stakes, non-competitive games only for me, please.
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Last spring when the world shut down - including hair salons - I went with the flow and decided that I simply grow out my hair. I chopped off my long locks shortly after getting married (seriously, does every woman do this?) in 2018 but didn’t think I’d grow it out again so soon. But ya gotta be flexible in times like these, right?
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We were interested in finding outdoor, COVID-friendly activities when passing through Las Vegas on our way to Utah. Fortunately, Vegas had some beautiful outdoor places to enjoy! Here’s where we visited near/in Vegas:
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This is our second time visiting Zion (our first being in 2017) but visitation was a bit different this time due to COVID. We thought we could roll up and take the Zion shuttle to get to the different trailheads like we did last time. NOPE. You need to have a shuttle ticket in order to board, and the number of tickets are limited.
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I had the pleasure of visiting my favorite national park on my husband’s birthday, of all days! It was not intentionally planned that way, but seeing how we packed a lot into one very full week, this was how it panned out. Ironically HB’s favorite park is Zion, which we visited the day after. But I love Bryce Canyon National Park so much because I think the landscape is unlike anything else. It takes my breath away every time. I’m sure HB got tired of hearing me say, “Cool! Look over here!” a million times during our hike. Seriously, every part of the park is photogenic.
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Weekly Outfits is a round-up of my favorite outfits of the past week.
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Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (what a mouthful!) is the furthest east we traveled on this trip. I didn’t know a lot about the area, but wanted to check it out since we had never been there before. Plus, its pretty close to Bryce Canyon, where we also wanted to go. During our two days there, we went on these 2 hikes:
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I had to eat my own words (No naps while out traveling! Sleep is for the weak!!) on the FIRST day of our trip when a 3 hr plane ride + 3 hr car ride to Joshua Tree National Park gave me a dull headache. While it bummed me out that I had to take some time to feel better, we still had plenty of time left to see parts of the park before sunset. The perks of heading west, where the sun sets at 7-8pm! With a couple of hours in Joshua Tree, here’s what we did/saw:
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At last, everything has arrived! I was so excited for all my parts to arrive and then to put everything together. It is indeed just as beautiful as I had imagined. I am in love with the overall look! If you’re curious, below is a final list of all supplies that I got to set up my Biorb aquarium. Some are the same items from a previous post, How Much Will Fishkeeping Cost?, but some are also different based on my additional research.
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In the last couple of weeks while reading Acts, I came across verses talking about the Good News such as: “But the believers who were scattered preached the Good News about Jesus wherever they went” (Acts 8:4). It made me wonder, what is the “Good News?” Why do we Christians call it that? What is the News and why is it so Good?
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Sparks Joy is a monthly roundup of people, experiences, or things that “sparked joy” for me during this time. If you do not know what that means, then I highly recommend that you take a gander at this book! It has been a great exercise for me to think about the people or things in my life that make me happier. It’s like practicing gratitude, but I can geek about them here online!
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Weekly Outfits is a round-up of my favorite outfits of the past week.
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Just as the title says - we’re going on a national parks trip to the Southwest USA this next week! It has been more than a year since we last traveled, and I think we’re ready to get out. Our last trip was to Peru in Oct 2019, back when everything was “normal.” This time around, our travels will be quite different as we take more precautions to protect ourselves against COVID. Hello, face shields!
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Weekly Outfits is a round-up of my favorite outfits of the past week.
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It’s finally time to go shopping! Hopefully by now, you’ve made a detailed shopping list and know exactly what you’re looking for. Thanks to this pandemic, I had to buy most of my new wardrobe online. It’s kind of awesome but also kind of stressful because the possibilities are endless! I narrowed down my choices by selecting new pieces from the following stores. They are my tried and true favorites!
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It never occurred to me until I started reading The Curated Closet that there is a correct way to shop for clothes. Only when I read its “THIRTEEN questions to ask oneself before making a purchase” did it dawn on me that most of my clothes were bought on a whim. Let’s take a look at how to shop for clothes that you will love and wear over and over again!
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After a nice long drought of not buying any new board games, last week I snagged a copy of PARKS on sale. PARKS has been on my board game wishlist since last year. Its incredible artwork drew me in, for sure! Over the weekend HB and I tried out this new game and here are my first impressions.
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Weekly Outfits is a round-up of my favorite outfits of the past week.
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Now that I’ve tried on a bunch of clothes and know what looks good on me, I can start creating a plan for my closet rehaul. I did a closet clean-out where I evaluated all of my clothes and sorted them into 5 categories: donate, repair, tailor, temporary hold, and keep.
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Previously, I expressed the desire to have a desktop aquarium. As I research, I am discovering that there are a LOT of accessories that’s involved with fishkeeping. Here, I am going to list all of the items a beginner fish parent will need + its estimated cost. Hello, reality check!
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In a previous post, I introduced the idea of Redefining My Style where I examined what my ideal style would look like. I concluded that the overall vibe I’m going for is a casual, feminine style that is comfortable, well-tailored, and effortlessly chic. I found a bunch of inspiration photos online that demonstrated this perfectly. While those clothes looked good on those girls, what will actually work on me?
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One late night while browsing my favorite fashion blogs, I came across this picture of a blogger wearing a cute knit black scarf:
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This idea has been on my mind for a while, so let’s take a deep dive in this post. I want a cute little aquarium to display on my desk or bookshelf, but I have not taken the plunge just yet.
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With the Stardew Valley board game coming out, my interest in the game has renewed! I actually bought the computer game a while ago. Its cute graphics and relaxing farming theme highly appealed to me.
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Out in Pilot Point, Texas is a tulip field called Texas Tulips where you get to pick your own tulips. Today, the weather was beautiful, which made it the perfect day to go!
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Throughout this last year while stuck at home quarantining in the middle of a global pandemic, I learned to keep myself busy/entertained with many interests. One of these projects is redefining and figuring out my personal style with the guidance of The Curated Closet.
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Ever since I learned about creating static sites, I dropped dynamic ones like a hot potato. Goodbye clunky old CMS, hello Github Pages.
Read more »This is a blog where I like to try out new development ideas and share what’s currently interesting me at the moment. Since I have a lot of thoughts and ideas in my brain, this is a free space where I can lay them all out. Welcome to the inner workings of my mind!
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